Fusion sounds great for a notebook PC or other similar form factor, so long as it can play 1080p video without too much difficulty. I'm not seeing how Fusion will replace discrete graphics solutions though, at least not in the short term.

Wedbush Securities analyst Patrick Wang said Nvidia's problems are specific to the graphics chip business and its product lines. He said demand has been weak for Nvidia's new Fermi product.

...

Nvidia said cost increases led to a greater-than-expected shift to lower-priced graphics chips, and personal computers running lower-end integrated graphics.

So it appears that NVIDIA's Fermi project hasn't done so well thus far (ya think?) and makes me wonder if NVIDIA will ever try implementing a new architecture on a new manufacturing process again.

Also mentioned in the CNBC article, the International Trade Commission has ruled against NVIDIA and other companies in their patent dispute with Rambus. The ITC issued an order barring the importation of any chip made with the disputed technology. I'm not sure if that means NVIDIA graphics chips can no longer be shipped into the U.S.A. but that would be really bad news for NVIDIA if that were the case.

In the final bit of NVIDIA news, Fudzilla reports that NVIDIA plans on shipping a GF104 with all 384 SP's enabled as a replacement for the GTX 470 as soon as the GTX 470 sells out of its current inventory. I know Astro doesn't care much for Fudzilla reports but this is what I'm waiting for. My only fear now is that it will be priced higher than what I want to pay, considering how the GTX 470 is already priced well above my USD$250 price point.

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So it appears that NVIDIA's Fermi project hasn't done so well thus far (ya think?) and makes me wonder if NVIDIA will ever try implementing a new architecture on a new manufacturing process again.

lolz, does that mean AMD are the perceived 'winners' of this perennial pi$$ing contest, even though they have also lost a megawad of money for the last few quarters(and then some)??

Fermi hasn't been a compelling product for various reasons. Heat/power draw/performance. I definitely haven't felt the need to upgrade from my 295. I'll see what the 28nm kit turns out like next year.

I think a lot has to be said for the effect of the console market too, the new variants of the PS3 and Xbox360 have sold bucketloads. Heck even *I* have a 360 now. Considering titles like RDR or FFXIII don't make it to PC, or titles that do make it get their late+DRM(like AC2), I'm sure I'm not the only 'pc gamer/enthusiast' type that has jumped into consoles this year.

I think a lot has to be said for the effect of the console market too, the new variants of the PS3 and Xbox360 have sold bucketloads. Heck even *I* have a 360 now. Considering titles like RDR or FFXIII don't make it to PC, or titles that do make it get their late+DRM(like AC2), I'm sure I'm not the only 'pc gamer/enthusiast' type that has jumped into consoles this year.

mtfbwya

Perhaps. I bought a PS3 Slim shortly after they were announced. I have yet to actually play a game on it though. In fact I remember when I took my PS3 to the counter to buy it the clerk asked me what games I was going to get with it. I was like, "Oh. Yeah. I need to get a game with this too." So I ended up buying Pure but thus far I've only used my PS3 for folding proteins and playing Blu-Ray movies.

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@Char - its a shame the US doesn't have playTV yet, you could at least also use it as a PVR. I know lots of HTPCers that have a PS3 just for this purpose and linked together with their pcs via ps3 media server

ran into a very informative article on the up and coming PCI-E 3.0 tech. in short, a 16x slot will have a total of 32GB/s bandwidth with a total of 1GB/s bandwidth in each direction for a single lane. probably nothing too exciting for gamers unless you want to run SLI/Crossfire, but its great news for anyone running CUDA or Fusion based apps on a workstation.

Surely nothing will hit the market until the move to a 28nm process is completed - otherwise the thing will run way too hot?!!
@stingerhs... pcie-3 specs are amazing - if only pc gaming devs could code with such things in mind - sadly pc games are still being made targeting single core performance and factoring in lower end kit.

* * *

In other news:

*The Net Neutrality debate has reared its ugly head again, with Google and Verizon musing on creating premium internet services for the well moneyed, and potentially leaving others out in the cold. I know a lot of people are jumping up and down about it but the details are far from confirmed, so its impact on the average user is nothing more than speculation at this point.

*Good news for Canadian x360 owners, who can now officially use their console as an IP TV device. We'll be getting something similar here in Oz later this year too. Not sure what is happening with it in the US.

Apparently they were being shown off at Celebration V - not sure what the front looks like yet, but in the pic above at the back you can see another device that looks the same and has some chrome beveling on it.

I imagine it wont look hugely different from the standard droid 2. I'm not a fan of hardware keyboards myself, but they are great for gaming - you can even get a game gripper for the droid, which is pretty cool now that android has a nes/genesis/snes/gba and ps1 emulator. For those that prefer a touchscreen only droid, there is the DroidX(see a few posts back) or the HTC Desire, which comes out soon in the US as well.

Speaking of SW Geeky@Android - there is a cool looking adobeAIR app for android that simulates the XWing Targeting computer from ANH - you can use it to track 'distance to target' via GPS, or simply as a clock. Replete with R2 chirps and Red Squadron chatter....cant wait to check it out More info Here

Here's some more pics negsun - just rememebr because it is currently a Verizon exclusive, you will need to wait until some unlocked versions will appear that will work in the UK. If you're really keen on it - keep your eye on/contact a place like clove.co.uk The droid1 was officially released in the UK as the Milestone, so the D2 will likely get an official release, but this may or may not include the R2 edition

The game gripper I mentioned above is here - as you can see it utilised the hardware keyboard quite nicely. The vid below is on the Droid1

It will be interesting to see how these go. There hasnt even been a convicning android based tablet to date - whilst chromeOS may be more useful as a productivity device - there still is quite a strong demand for a viable android tablet out there.

Google has also released this HTML5 showcase page - if you want to see what HTML5 is capable of - visit it and have a look/play

Engadget also did an interesting preview of XboxLive integration with the new Windows Phone 7 Platform. I was hoping Limbo would have been one of the cross platform games - but not so apparently. Still, looks interesting - seems like MS are quite serious about WP7 as a gaming platform.

It's not clear to me how this is going to work out long term. Short term I can see Intel pushing OEM's to include McAfee along with Intel CPU's. Maybe AMD will decide they need to keep up with Intel and buy Symantec?

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I honestly don't remember a great deal about the PC graphics market prior to 2005 as I didn't pay close attention to it prior to that time. It seems like a lot of the "old timers" remember 3dfx making this same move into retail back in the day and failing miserably. I'm sure NVIDIA's AIB partners are not real happy about NVIDIA's decision to move into their territory, even if it's just Best Buy for now. I've got to think that PNY is especially miffed as that is the graphics brand I've noticed on the occasional trip to my local Best Buy.

So where are the AMD supporters? Word on the web (a.k.a. Fudzilla) is that the new Radeon HD 6000 series launches in a week's time. Alas these will be AMD Radeon's. RIP ATI.

P.S. Welcome to Team LFN Negative Sun. It's about time you joined up and got to folding some proteins.

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Yes, AMD still in the red though I figure this time it's bloodstains left from slaying of ATI. On the earnings conference call CEO Dirk Meyer did say, "We'll be introducing our second-generation of DX11 technology into the market with some launch activities actually next week. We'll be shipping all the family members of that product line I'll call it, by the end of this quarter, and total volume think in terms of several hundred thousand, or hundreds of thousands of units." Source: Anandtech. Other sources are reporting launch is next Friday, Oct. 22, so we should have some performance figures to discuss next weekend. I wonder when and what NVIDIA will respond with. Someone on Expreview's (Chinese language) forums posted about a GTX 580 in the works that got picked up by pcgameshardware.de (German language) and subsequently Fudzilla. So I'm not too sure how reliable this info can be considered. I'm still waiting for a fully enabled GF104 to be released.

Intel's financial performance has been nothing less than impressive, especially considering the current state of the global economy. Must be nice to have such a large share of the CPU market.

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The graphics wars are heating up again. AMD introduced the Radeon 6870 and 6850 a couple of weeks back. However if you were expecting these to be the replacement for the the 5870 and 5850 then your expectations have not been met. Apparently AMD is realigning their Radeon naming conventions. Whereas x8xx numbers in the past have usually been the top end GPUs AMD/ATI released, they have now become the second tier GPUs.

So from what I've read AMD is realigning their Radeon naming conventions to make room for the Fusion series of products. While that may be true this still smacks of NVIDIA's notorious renaming schemes. I guess as long as AMD sticks with this revised naming scheme for a few years then I won't lump them in the same "pick-whatever-new-name-out-of-your-arse" bucket as NVIDIA.

So anybody planning to pick up one of the new Radeon 6000-series cards?

The NDA on Intel's new Sandy Bridge CPU architecture has lifted a couple of days before the official launch. The skinny is that it boasts about a 15-17% IPC advantage over Nehalem, which is, incidentally, the same advantage Nehalem presently enjoys over Core 2, and that its 32nm process allows for monster overclocks (4.4GHz), even with the stock heatsink. Overclocking will only be possible by changing the multiplier, requiring an unlocked "K" model, which will carry a small price premium of ~$11-23, depending on the model.

"They should rename the team to the Washington Government Sucks. Put Obama on the helmet. Line the entire walls of the stadium with the actual text of the ACA.

Fix their home team score on the board to the debt clock, they can win every game 17,000,000,000,000 to 24. Losing team gets taxed by the IRS 100%, then droned."

The NDA on Intel's new Sandy Bridge CPU architecture has lifted a couple of days before the official launch. The skinny is that it boasts about a 15-17% IPC advantage over Nehalem, which is, incidentally, the same advantage Nehalem presently enjoys over Core 2, and that its 32nm process allows for monster overclocks (4.4GHz), even with the stock heatsink. Overclocking will only be possible by changing the multiplier, requiring an unlocked "K" model, which will carry a small price premium of ~$11-23, depending on the model.

Lots of news coming out of CES this week. NVIDIA finally pulled the cat out of the bag and revealed they've been working on an ARM based System-On-Chip. Apparently NVIDIA has their sights on the desktop and server market segments. And then Microsoft announced that ARM processors will be supported on the next version of Windows. I've got to think Intel saw that coming but not much they could do about it. I never really thought the Wintel duopoly would be seriously challenged like this.

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The 20x speed increase is for DRAM. I don't know about the rest of you but I love it when people find ways to significantly improve computing performance. I have to admit that I wasn't aware of this "memory wall" as I always thought the big bottleneck for PC performance was physical storage devices like HDD's and optical disc drives. Apparently this new tech will be initially aimed at routers and switches (so the Interwebz can run faster) but is expected to eventually trickle down to consumer-level memory products, maybe by 2015 or so.

EDIT: Did anyone get bitten by the Intel 6-series chipset bug? Some of you had expressed interest in making the move to Sandy Bridge so I was just wondering.

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Lots of cool news happening this week though, found an article that has a few rolled into one: Clicky

An iPhone Mini sounds very attractive for the Pay as You Go crowd (to which I now belong too thanks to redundancy), but if any HTC product out there is better at the same price level I'd still get it first [/fanboy]

Nokia and Windows isn't 2 things I would have put together a few months ago but there you have it, lets hope it can boost both Windows' competitiveness with Android and Nokia's with HTC/Samsung/Apple.

I'm a bit sceptical about the new HTC Desire leaks, but I'd love to see one as awesome as the original Desire (which I own and is inherently the best smartphone ever!), and a Super Amoled screen does sounds sweet, not keen on the touchscreen hardware buttons though.

It's been reported that this bug is not present in the upcoming Z68 chipset, which is the first chipset that will allow both overclocking and Quick Sync, Intel's nifty new video transcoding utilizing Sandy Bridge's onboard GPU. I still find it baffling that Intel felt it necessary to launch three different mainstream chipsets instead of just one.

"They should rename the team to the Washington Government Sucks. Put Obama on the helmet. Line the entire walls of the stadium with the actual text of the ACA.

Fix their home team score on the board to the debt clock, they can win every game 17,000,000,000,000 to 24. Losing team gets taxed by the IRS 100%, then droned."

I had to make sure that I hadn't purchased one of these defective chipset MoBo's... Happily, the p55 boards are unaffected - I got lucky I guess, as the tech on that chipset was about as untested as the 6 series.

As to the bafflement you describe, Q, I share it. It seems that Intel and other manufacturers are doing anything they can to insure future profitability by increasingly speedy planned obsolescence. Aggravating.

From Anandtech's review it looks like the production version didn't end up with all the bells-and-whistles that Intel was showing off at IDF 2010. Apparently Thunderbolt only supports PCI-Express and DisplayPort whereas the Anandtech guys were under the distinct impression Light Peak technology was originally intended to serve as a unified transport technology for HDMI, DVI, USB, FireWire, SATA, et al. Additionally Thunderbolt is only launching with copper as supported physical transport medium. Thunderbolt support for fiber optic transport is supposed to come toward the end of this year. That being said, 10 Gbps bi-directional throughput over copper is nothing to sneeze at.

Image file posted on Anandtech.com

So we'll see how Thunderbolt works out. OEM's like Western Digital, Seagate, and Promise have already announced their support for Thunderbolt. I guess this pretty much confirms my suspicions that Thunderbolt was the reason for Intel's slow adoption of USB 3.0 for its new chipsets since it's fairly obvious Thunderbolt is a competing in the same space.

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